Image by urbanworkbench via Flickr As I sit in my home office looking out across the garden at the lightening playing off the mountain range, I pondered what to write. I know that I have slowed down over the past month or so, adn that the posts have been fairly serious and heavy in nature. […]

We love composting. In fact, we’ve got a worm bin in the kitchen as well as two composting bins right down the back. I built these pallet composting bays to formalize the work of the previous owners of the house, but always knew that winter composting is not much fun to start with, but when […]

There’s snow on the mountains, about a foot or so on Kootenay Pass I hear, this feels early, but maybe I’m just not quite ready for the onslaught. We are in the midst of harvest here in the Kootenays. Our house is full of stored, canned, ready to can, and dehydrated fruit and vegetables. The dehydrator is running as I write, Italian plums at the moment.

Regular readers will know that here at UrbanWorkbench, we’ve dabbled in all sorts of crops that are not regularly associated with the Kootenays. Last year it was wheat, oats and amaranth, this year we had great success with a bed of pink popcorn. With around 80 cobs of corn husked and drying, the next task […]

This year we won the Pass Creek Fall Fair competition for the largest sunflower head. The specimen I cut from our garden just before last weekend’s festivities measured a whopping 18 inches across. Since last weekend, I’ve employed my daughters Eden and Nyssa to remove the seeds from this head, which we completed last night. The total seed yield weighed in at just over a pound (478 grams). These are good eating seeds, so now we will dry them off and roast some of them for eating. The rest, we’ll save for planting next spring, or possibly sell off for aspiring competitors!

This week has been a bit of a write-off from the perspective of tackling the to-do and to-write lists. Selecting photos for the Pass Creek Fall Fair exhibition, as well as vegetables, fruit and preserves. Robyn has sewing, crocheting and baking in as well, and the girls are entering some stuff too.